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The Bigger the Cage the Larger the Lizard Will Get

Tiff Holland

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1. She comes home to find the cop running his new jean jacket through the gravel and oil in the driveway. He is trying to make it look weathered. He has already sewn Harley Davidson patches on the back. He is stubbled, growing a beard. He already has a Harley. He will play the biker. She bought the jacket for him for Christmas. She tries not to be angry that he’s cut off the sleeves.

2. He works in the Bat Cave. He calls it the Bat Cave. She can hear the trains roar by when he calls on the phone, swears she can hear the whole place shaking. They stop talking until the tracks quiet. His office is near the water plant. She could find it if she wanted, but she doesn’t. The Bat Cave, she teases him. I could tell you but I’d have to kill you, he jokes back.

3. He shows her the wire that nestles in a pager, the camera that films from the tip of the pen. He explains the way they videotape motel rooms from neighboring rooms, all the sound and signals traveling through the electrical sockets. Most of the drug deals take place in motel rooms or cemeteries. Cemeteries are also good places to meet CI’s. She keeps track of this information. She tells her aunt to pick a different hotel when she visits. Avoid the Day’s Inn with its free breakfast, she says. The Holiday Inn is good, something bigger, in town.

4. He usually gets off at ten, home before eleven. She goes to bed at eleven. She doesn’t worry unless he isn’t home by two. Two a.m. is the cut-off if there is an arrest and booking and reports to be written. She wakes up at two-thirty and he isn’t there. She watches the fishing channel. She didn’t know there was a fishing channel. He calls her at four. Does she want the good news first or the bad? She says the bad. She always says the bad.

5. Someone got shot. It wasn’t me, the cop says. The bad guy, he always calls them bad guys, was in bed. The SWAT team broke down the door. The cop didn’t know the bad guy’s girlfriend was in the bathroom, didn’t know she had two forty-fives in there with her. 

6. He  builds a large cage, two by fours and wire. One of the bad guys had an iguana. They keep it at the Bat Cave. The cop won’t touch it but the other guys do, the one who dresses like a hillbilly and the one who wears his baseball cap backwards and says he’s a bouncer at a titty bar. They feed the iguana. They pet the iguana. The cop hooks up lights to keep the lizard warm. He buys it food. It smells he tells the others. The iguana grows used to the vibrations from the trains. It outgrows the cage and the cop builds another. The bad guy who used to own it is in prison. The cops seized his house, his cars but the lizard they took out of pity. Sometimes, during a raid, they have to shoot protective dogs. Cats escape. Representatives from Child Services come for the kids. 

7. The cop doesn’t want to go back on the road. His uniforms no longer fit. His face is tender to the razor. He has been away too long. The young cops don’t know him, but they’ve heard stories, war stories they call them. They hang over after shift change to hear them.

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Tiff Holland’s poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction has appeared in dozens of literary magazines and e-zines. Tiff has published two chapbooks, Bone In a Tin Funnel and the Rosemetal Press Award-winning Betty Superman, which later anchored the IPPY Award-winning My Very End of the Universe. Tiff’s full-length collection of poetry My Mother’s Transvestites was published during the pandemic but is available from tiffholland@sbcglobal.net.

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